In classroom, Bears must finish what they start

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, November 30, 2008

Cal head coach Jeff Tedford leads his team onto the field to face UCLA Saturday October 25, 2008. Cal defeated UCLA in Berkeley Calif 41-20

Cal head coach Jeff Tedford leads his team onto the field to face UCLA Saturday October 25, 2008. Cal defeated UCLA in Berkeley Calif 41-20

Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle

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Cal's Nyan Boateng keeps his balance and spins out of a UCLA tackle for a first down in the first half of the Bears 41-20 victory over UCLA in Berkeley, Calif., on Saturday, October 25, 2008.

Cal's Nyan Boateng keeps his balance and spins out of a UCLA tackle for a first down in the first half of the Bears 41-20 victory over UCLA in Berkeley, Calif., on Saturday, October 25, 2008.

Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle

In classroom, Bears must finish what they start

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In his seven years as Cal football coach, Jeff Tedford has given a previously downtrodden program a national identity. Under his guidance, the Bears will play in their sixth straight bowl game this season.

Another measure of a college coach is his players' graduation rate, and Tedford seems to be winning there too. Out of the first class Tedford recruited at Cal - a small group of 18 in 2002 - 15 graduated. That's an excellent percentage, considering the depths to which Cal had fallen in its graduation rates under previous coaches.

Some reports from the NCAA over the past few years, however, have not painted Cal in a flattering light. That's because the NCAA uses two yardsticks to measure the academic progress of each school's athletes.

One is the Graduation Success Rate (GSR), a calculation that averages the graduation rates of four consecutive freshman classes. The other is the Academic Progress Rate (APR), which rewards schools each term for every retained player who remains academically eligible, thus on pace to graduate. Both sets of statistics have been issued the last four years.

Here's the complicated part: Cal's graduation rate for football, that is, for players who entered school from 1995 to 2001, has been abysmal, near the bottom of the Pac-10 Conference. Its players' progress rate, however, has been exemplary.

The graduation record frustrates Cal people and mystifies former coach Tom Holmoe, now athletic director at Brigham Young.

Cal officials complain that even the most recent NCAA graduation figures are misleading because they deal entirely with students who were recruited before Tedford took over. His recruits won't start showing up in the GSR numbers until next fall.

Top public university

Still, for the school ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the top public university in the country, the NCAA's assessment of Cal athletes' grad rates isn't easy to stomach.

In the Pac-10, Cal ranked ninth in the first three annual graduation rate reports before moving up slightly to a tie for eighth in the data released last month.

It hasn't helped that, while Cal has languished around the 50 percent mark in football graduations, Stanford has led the Pac-10 consistently with percentages in the 90s. Meanwhile, the Cal student body's graduation rate improved during those years from 82 to 88 percent.

A coach certainly has a responsibility to ride herd academically on players he didn't recruit. Tedford, however, was hired late in 2001, so some of the athletes covered in this year's NCAA figures graduated after his first few months on campus.

"I can't speak to that," Tedford said. "I had no control over that. All I can speak to is the focus on academics since we've been here."

That focus has been enthusiastic and steadfast, according to a host of Cal officials, faculty members and players.

Don't cut, don't be late

"It's a serious thing here," linebacker Worrell Williams said. "Our football success has overshadowed it a little bit, but this is definitely an academic school first and foremost. If you miss a class or you're late to a tutoring session, then you'll have to do a lot more than what you already have to do for homework."

But not everyone on campus believes that academics come first for most football players.

Alice Agogino, a professor of mechanical engineering and a former academic senate chair, said the average grade point average for football players is "really low," although it's better than at other schools. Many Cal players haven't even declared their majors by their senior year, she said. "Then they cobble a major together."

Intercollegiate football "is a commercial enterprise, not an academic enterprise," she said. The problem is not that Cal is taking unqualified students to play football, she said, but rather that "we put so much pressure on them that they can't be real students."

Disagreements on campus over football's proper place in an academic institution are bound to rage endlessly. The more pressing issue is how to tell whether players are making their way through such institutions at an acceptable pace.

Tedford and Cal officials maintain the progress rate is far more timely than the graduation figures and thus a more accurate assessment of the current coaching staff's academic emphasis.

The Bears fare much better in the APR. Although Stanford, with a 986, was tops in the country in the football figures issued in May for the four prior school years, Cal was second in the Pac-10 at 967, among the upper 20 percent of major-school programs. Cal was a strong second to Stanford in each of the three previous APR reports as well.

Draft dropouts don't count

Another reason that Tedford and coaches from other national football contenders prefer the APR is that several players each year complete their eligibility in good academic standing but drop out of school to prepare for the NFL draft. Such players don't count against the Graduation Success Rate, but they don't help it either. In essence, they disappear because they are unlikely to get their degrees in the NCAA's six-year window.

As a result, schools are trying harder than ever to get players to take summer courses so they can graduate before heading off to the NFL Combine in February.

Cal is trying hard to boost its graduation numbers, and that's where Derek van Rheenen comes in. A former all-conference soccer player for Cal, he heads the school's Athletic Study Center. He supervises a full-time staff of 11 and an army of 60 tutors and lab monitors who work with almost 1,000 Cal athletes on 27 intercollegiate teams.

According to van Rheenen, the center's budget is $700,000. That's less than half of UCLA's $1.8 million budget for academic services for athletes. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that 25 schools have budgets of more than $1 million, topped by Oklahoma at $2.9 million.

Cal's center is supported by a combination of campus funds, endowments and the athletic department, but van Rheenen reports to a vice provost, not to Tedford or athletic director Sandy Barbour.

"His program is a model for programs around the country," said Jesse Choper, a law school professor and a faculty athletic representative. "These student-athletes work their butts off. It's like going to school and having a full-time job. They do very, very well in my judgment."

Van Rheenen arrived shortly before Tedford in 2001. He said Cal's poor graduation rates for football players admitted from 1995 to 2001 were due to several factors, including a lack of a director for the study center during that time. "There wasn't the same support," he said.

There also was a less stringent admissions policy for athletes; it was toughened in the 2001-02 school year, he said.

Van Rheenen suspects that some pre-Tedford players lost their academic focus as a result of their lack of football success during Holmoe's 12-43 tenure.

Winning makes 'em smarter

"People on the outside will think that if you're having a miserable season, athletes will focus their energies on school," he said. "It doesn't work that way in my experience. Rather, everything tanks.

"Oftentimes, if you're on a high-profile team like football or basketball, you're embarrassed to be on campus. When you're winning, these kids are holding their head high. They're glad to go to class. They're happy to be seen by other students and get the pat on the back. They tend to do much better in the classroom as well."

Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson, who has written annually about football graduation rates, doesn't buy that theory.

"How does that explain Northwestern?" he said. "There's a ton of perennial losers whose kids still graduate."

Because of its low graduation rates and the school's high academic reputation, Jackson said, "Cal has always stuck out in my mind."

Holmoe admitted he was at a loss to fully explain Cal's poor graduation rates on his watch. "You have accountability for the ones you bring in," he said. "I don't think we ever brought in a kid who was a mercenary or who we thought would drop out. ... I don't like to see those numbers."

He said he thought the tutoring program at the time was sufficient. "Each one of the freshmen met with an academic adviser and his position coach at least once a week," he said.

Red alert

Under Tedford's system, the so-called "Academic Game Plan," all freshmen and transfers are considered in the "red" category academically. Their progress is closely monitored.

Too closely, All-Pac-10 center Alex Mack thought when he was a freshman. "There were a lot of eyeballs on me, and I wasn't used to it," he said. "In high school, I just got my work done and that was it. I come here, and coaches want to see my papers, my schedule laid out, my notebooks."

An excellent student who graduated last year and is taking graduate courses in the school of education, Mack quickly moved to the "yellow" category of more limited supervision and to "green" - for proven students.

"At Berkeley, they make you earn it," linebacker Zack Follett said. "They make you work for it."

Tedford sets the tone, of course, and several faculty members interviewed for this story applaud him for it.

"I believe Tedford is concerned with the overall welfare of his players and what they're going to amount to when they get out of here," said Choper, the law professor. "This is a not a farm club for the NFL."

Nevertheless, it churns out NFL players every year. There are 30 ex-Cal players in the NFL, just two fewer than USC. Running back Marshawn Lynch, who plays for the Buffalo Bills, took Tedford's academic demands to heart although he left after his junior year.

"He improved every semester at Cal and had a 3.0 (grade point average) his last fall," said Mark Jensen, a former Bears placekicker who until this year was the team's liaison to the Athletic Study Center. "He wanted to make sure he was in good academic standing so he could come back and get his degree when he was finished with the NFL."

Lynch's first big year at Cal was 2005, when the Bears went 8-4. But Tedford and van Rheenen point with pride to that school year for another reason: The team posted its first perfect 1,000 APR score.

Where Cal looks bad

Here's how Pac-10 football teams have performed according to the NCAA's Graduation Success Rate since the data was first collected in 1995. The GSR is the percentage of players who graduate within six years, not counting players who leave school early in good academic standing. Each score is an average for four classes.

2005

(players who entered in 1995-98)

2006

(players who entered in 1996-99)

2007

(players who entered in 1997-00)

2008

(players who entered in 1998-01)

Rank/school

GSR

Rank/school

GSR

Rank/school

GSR

Rank/school

GSR

1. Stanford

92

1. Stanford

94

1. Stanford

93

1. Stanford

93

2. Washington

75

2. Washington

66

2. Washington

64

2. Washington State

68

3. Oregon

63

3. Oregon State

60

3. Oregon State

62

3. Oregon State

64

3. UCLA

63

4. UCLA

59

4. Washington State

58

4. Washington

65

5. Washington State

56

4. Oregon

59

5. USC

57

5. UCLA

62

6. USC

55

6. Washington State

57

6. UCLA

56

6. Arizona State

60

7. Oregon State

53

7. Arizona State

56

7. Arizona State

55

7. USC

54

8. Arizona State

52

8. USC

55

7. Oregon

55

8. Cal

53

9. Cal

47

9. Cal

44

9. Cal

52

9. Oregon

53

10. Arizona

44

10. Arizona

39

10. Arizona

41

10. Arizona

41

Where Cal looks good

Here's how Pac-10 football teams have performed according to the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate since the data was first collected in 2003. The APR gives four points per school year to each retained and academically eligible athlete, divides the total by the total points possible and multiplies that number by 1,000. The highest possible score is 1,000. Beginning in 2008, the scores announced each year are four-year averages.

2005

(2003-04 school year)

2006

(2003-04 and 2004-05

school years)

2007

(2003-04, 2004-05

and 2005-06 school years)

2008

(2003-04, 2004-05,

2005-06, 2006-07 school years)

Rank/school

APR

Rank/school

APR

Rank/school

APR

Rank/school

APR

1. Stanford

994

1. Stanford

995

1. Stanford

984

1. Stanford

986

2. Cal

924

2. Cal

945

2. Cal

965

2. Cal

967

3. Oregon State

922

3. Washington

935

3. USC

947

3. USC

948

4. Washington State

916

3. Washington State

935

4. Washington

942

4. Washington

948

5. Washington

912

5. USC

929

5. UCLA

931

5. UCLA

941

6. USC

910

6. UCLA

915

6. Washington State

930

6. ASU

933

7. Oregon

893

7. Oregon State

910

7. Arizona State

926

7. Oregon State

926

8. UCLA

890

8. Arizona State

905

8. Oregon State

913

8. Oregon

921

9. Arizona State

887

9. Oregon

900

9. Oregon

912

9. Washington State

916

10. Arizona

868

10. Arizona

882

10. Arizona

883

10. Arizona

902

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